I'm always going to consignment and thrift stores building up our library. I'm actually going to have to go get a new book shelf because we are out of space! I get reading books, textbooks, coloring books, used work books...whatever i can find! Then the kids can get into them all whenever they want. I love seeing them read to each other or grab a work book all on their own and help each other out to do the activities. Makes the job of homeschooling a lot easier for me when they are learning on their own haha! Do you have a home library? Any other ideas of things to stock up on? I was thinking games and puzzles would be good too!

We love books. We have a shelf of books in the playroom and my daughter has a shelf of books in her bedroom. I also have about six rubbermaid totes full of books in storage that I used when I taught public school (I started collecting children's books for a classroom library in college).

I had to give LO my biggest, nicest bookcase. I keep his DVDs and family DVDs on the top shelf, phonics and art books on the second shelf, then parenting, activity, craft, and storybook collections on the next shelf. Below that are science, anatomy, history, bible storybooks, and a stack of puzzles. The next shelf down is storybooks, all the Mo Willems books, Biscuit books, Berenstain Bears collection, Seuss books, Jan Brett books, Richard Scarry books, and some nice picture books he can look at alone to entertain himself. The bottom shelf is plastic shoeboxes full of pompons and foam shapes, puzzles in zip bags, small toys like noisy keychains and plastic animals, flashlights and battery operated tiny toys, and one with craft supplies he is allowed to use unsupervised. I keep a lamp, my laminator, and the abacus on top of the bookcase. All of the board books we are keeping are heaped in a canvas bin that I stash under a table, but LO lugs the dang thing in front of the bookcase almost every day, and leans his beanbag chair against it to "read."

Sometimes, there is a veritable carpet of books and Lego covering my living room floor, and I have to tidy the shelves myself every couple of days, but this works for us. Switching on the vacuum cleaner puts LO into hyperdrive, and you've never seen a floor picked up so fast. LOL. He hasn't yet grasped the fact that not everything will fit up the hose.

I'm a serious book addict! I could never have enough book shelves. Right now I have DS11, DS12 and DD3 so I have a bunch of boxes of grades K-3 books in the garage.

I try to buy games and manipulatives that can be used lots of ways for a long time. Games like Bananagrams, we can play the game, I can have the kids do their pelling words with the letter tiles, my 3 yr old can sort letters she knows, I can give them an assignment "challenge" like take out 30 tiles and make as many words as you can.

White boards, chalk boards, pattern blocks, building blocks, can all be used by all of my kids, ages 3-12.

My 3 yr old got some "City Blocks" for her 3rd birthday. MY older kids love to build with them. My 11 yr old recently built a seat he could sit on (wish I took a photo, it was some serious engineering!!) When we studied the vikings he decided to build a viking longship out of them:

DD with her City Blocks:

There are even things that I never thought of ahead of time, like a BINGO set. We have used these BINGO balls a lot!

If they kids need to practice double digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, I have them roll out to balls, write them down and add/sub/mult, whatever they are working on. A great way for quick practice drills that is not a boring worksheet. It is fun to turn the crank and keeps you moving a bit.

DD loves the balls and the other day she found several containers and carefully sorted them. "Take a picture of my sorting!" When she was younger simply picking up the bals and setting them in the tray was perfect fine motor, one to one correspondence, learning colors. Now she is into sorting. Soon she will learn to read the numbers on the ball, later do math problems with them etc.

I collect things. Hubby hates this about me. I have all sorts of things for school.

We have books on shelves in grace's room. Bins of work books that are waiting to be used. Stashes of crayons, markers, color pencils and other writing implements. Loads of playdoh & tools. A tub filled to bursting with all types of coloring and activity books. Erasers squirreled away in jars. Games overflowing their shelves. Crates of puzzles. Buckets of flash cards for everything from Abc to SAT prep.

I love buying books and supplies.
There is a bit on the movie You've Got Mail where they are talking about school supplies & how they love the smell of them & love to buy them...that is me...send me a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils & I will be a happy girl :)

I bought more books last weekend & bought a work book today (75 cents brand new!)

My home library consists of DVDs and books. I'll give you what I have in my library so far. One of the books I have Grandma and the Pirates I have had since I was small and the cover is starting to come off. I also have some ECE textbooks of mine that I am keeping for reference.

Oh we have an extensive library after many years of homeschool five different children. I pick books up everywhere but mainly I get them from our second hand store Savers. My two greatest finds there were the entire collection of Signing Time videos and the Southwestern Company book collections - all of them ! I also found a beautiful storybook collection from Congrove that I had when I was a child. They were brand new ! I had to buy them all. The best part is that we use everything that I have bought. That is awesome to me.

I'm kinda a bibliophile. There wasn't a book invented that I didn't want to own! LOL. So my kids each have libraries dedicated to their ages, grades and interests. And then I have the book shelves dedicated to teaching/reference materials. I also collect science experiment kits and craft supplies. The kids can grab the materials to school for probably a year, all without leaving our house! LOL.